In “The Queer Art of Failure,” Judith Halberstam frames failure in terms of “ways of being and knowing that stand outside of conventional understandings of success” (2). Many of us have been conditioned to view failure as an endpoint; in other words, although it may come with important lessons to teach, the “purpose” of failure is ultimately to help set one back on the path toward success. But rather than looking at failure as a momentary misstep, Halberstam sees it as a potential way of life that can offer “more surprising ways of being in the world” (2). The show Lost reflects Halberstam’s ideas about what it means to fail, and how this failure can open up a new kind of optimism.
From the very first episode, Lost quibbles with the notion of existing in the world in a new way. After a plane crashes on a mysterious island, a group of survivors quickly realize that they should not be expecting rescue any time soon, and as a result, they must create entirely new ways of survival using the unfamiliar resources they have. In other words, they have no choice but to learn to “live life otherwise” (2). Not only must they deal with their physical separation from the “normal world” and its institutions/structures, but they also must push aside concepts of success that dictated their actions in a reality that now exists in the past. As a result, their lives on the island become a series of daily failures as they attempt to navigate a new way of existing, in a new space where the old “rules” simply do not apply.
In the show’s finale, the survivors of the plane crash—even those who died on the island—reunite in a utopic, after-life-like universe. The father of Jack (the main character of the show) appears as a ghostly presence to inform his son, “The most important part of your life was the time you spent with these people on that island…You needed all of them, and they needed you.” When Jack asks what they needed one another for, his father replies, “To remember, and to let go.” Ironically, the final insistence of the show, which has often presented mysteries of the island as if asking its characters (and its audience) to look for answers, is not on finding something but rather on letting go. This reflects Halberstam’s claim about the potential that comes with being open to “losing,” “unmaking,” and “undoing” (2). She argues, in the end, that we should not see failure as futile, but rather as a way of creating a new kind of optimism. Lost does exactly this. After spending years trying to negotiate their alternative lives on the islands with the baggage of their now alternate “realities,” Jack and the rest of the survivors of Flight 118 can only achieve happiness and be reunited with their loved ones once they “let go.” Their time on the island was not just about meeting their “soul mates,” but about learning to be okay with being lost.